


Family, Now and Forever and Whenever

by Tesseractingrey



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mid 7x01, Post-Canon, Time Travel, for the first chapter, for the rest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28847799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tesseractingrey/pseuds/Tesseractingrey
Summary: Deke has always wanted a family who loved him, and once he gets it, he has no intention of letting go.3 important moments with Deke and his family, and also he reverse engineers time travel, because he is a Fitz-Simmons after all.
Relationships: Alya Fitz & Deke Shaw, Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz & Deke Shaw, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my WIP folder since literally the night after the season premiere, and I'm finally committing to finishing it because I'm actually pretty proud of it. This chapter I just had to edit a little so it would fit with the end of the show, and the time travel chapter is pretty much done too, but the last one or two I still have to write. I'm hoping that publishing this will motivate me to work on it this week — I'm hoping to post the second chapter on Wednesday, the third sometime this weekend, and if there's a forth hopefully also this weekend or at least by next Wednesday. We'll see how it goes.

“Hey Deke.” Deke had been looking around the bunk that Enoch had told him was his while everyone else finished getting dressed in their 1930s clothing, noticing the fully stocked bookshelf, when Jemma walked in.

“Did you guys pick these books out for me?” He knew it was more likely that Enoch had done it, since Jemma and Fitz were busy redesigning the plane and inventing time travel, but Deke couldn’t help the note of hope that crept into his voice.

“Yeah, Fitz and I—well Daisy told me once that you were trying to read books back at the Lighthouse to catch up on the time period, and I know you’ve been out in the world and could’ve Googled anything, but Fitz and I wanted to give you some of our favorite books, if you’re still interested in learning about things. There’s plenty of science stuff in there, of course, but we also included books like the Percy Jackson books in case you want something a little bit lighter.” Jemma bit her lip nervously, clearly unsure about how he’d react. Deke still had the words from the argument he’d had with his grandparents no more than an hour ago ringing in his ears, but he realized that for Jemma, that could’ve been weeks or months or even years ago.

“I...I don’t think anyone’s ever done something this thoughtful for me before.” Deke couldn’t meet her eyes as he said it, still looking at the books. He wanted his grandparents to like him so much, it felt like a physical ache in his chest. Was this their way of apologizing? Did this mean he wasn’t a disappointment? He was almost afraid to hope. Some of this must have shown on his face, because seconds later, he felt warm arms wrapping around him. Against his will, Deke felt his eyes filling with tears, so he buried his face in his grandmother’s shoulder, hugging her back just as tightly. When she pulled back, Jemma wiped one of the escaping tears with her thumb. Deke wondered if this overwhelming warmth in his chest was the love that all of those books he’d read on family had been talking about.

“Look, I know it’s been about an hour since our fight for you, but Fitz and I had a lot of time to talk about it. When you see him again you guys will have to talk, but you should know that although you made some mistakes, he does love you. We both do.”

“Y-you love me? Really? Even after—”

“Of course we do, Deke. You’re family. We all make mistakes sometimes, but you are a good kid.” She smiled softly at him, and he wanted to smile back. Deke wasn’t sure if he’d ever smiled softly at anyone before. “Fitz gets a little testy about people taking his work because of some awful past experiences, particularly concerning The Framework, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you. You were willing to risk us being mad at you just so you could show us the jump drive, and then you went and used it yourself — you’ve made some mistakes, but we know you’re a good person. And a smart person too— even if you stole a lot of ideas, you’d still have to be pretty smart to successfully replicate them like you did. Sometimes, people say things in the heat of an argument that they don’t totally mean.” Hearing her call him smart definitely didn’t make his throat feel a bit tight and his eyes prickle a little. Definitely not.

“But if you do care about me then how come you didn’t tell me that Fitz died?” At this, Jemma looks down at her hands, twisting her fingers together.

“That has a lot more to do with me than it has to do with you.” She let out a long, slow breath before continuing. “You know the first time Fitz saw me cry, we’d been friends for 3 years, and living together for 2. I’d been up for 30 hours straight in the lab, trying to meet a deadline. Fitz had tried to stay up with me but he was falling asleep, so I sent him home for the night. When he found me the next morning, carrying breakfast and clean clothes because he’s always been so thoughtful, it was right after our boss had come in to check on my progress and yell at me for not being done yet. When I saw him standing there, being sweet and looking worried, I was so tired that I couldn’t help myself. I basically threw myself into his arms and started crying. I’m still not great with my emotions, but I have cried in front of more people since then, at least. I suppose I’ve cried in front of a lot of people ever since we went out into the field, actually, but it has been an insane couple of years.”

When Jemma paused, carefully looking up at his face to see his reaction, Deke took it as an opportunity to respond. It was clear that she was nervous, probably not used to being this vulnerable with anyone besides Fitz, or maybe Daisy too. Deke didn’t think he’d been truly emotionally vulnerable with anyone in his life, so he could relate. He was trying to shake off his old apocalyptic future mentality, so perhaps trying to let himself be vulnerable with his family would be good for him. Then again, maybe he’d already started doing that with his earlier outburst to his grandparents.

“I don’t think I’ve cried in front of anyone besides my parents, you know. I don’t think I’ve even cried at all since my parents died.” At this, Jemma gives him a small smile.

“Maybe being bad with emotions runs in the family.” Deke smiles back, a little, but there’s one more thing he wants to say. He pressed his lips together, unsure if he should continue, but he was trying to be open and honest, so—

“I think I would’ve cried if I knew Fitz died when it happened, instead of finding out after you’d already found him in space.” Deke feels a little bad for saying it when he sees the guilt on her face, but it needed to be said.

“In general, I prefer to lock my bad emotions away in a little box in my head, which I’ve learned is not a great strategy, but it’s hard to let them out in front of people when it’s about something that really matters. And nothing—” Here, she stumbled for the first time, as if most of her words were pre-rehearsed but she lost the script for this part. “I don’t think anything matters to me more than Fitz. The only time I cried was the day he died, and I never had to actually tell anyone that he died either — Mack did it for me. It’s not your fault that I’m not good at going to others for emotional support. I really did want to spare you the pain, because I don’t know how to share things like that by choice. I didn’t let others see me break down by choice, but they just happened to be there and you weren’t.” Deke feels a twinge of guilt at that, because it is his fault that he wasn’t there. He did choose to leave, after all.

“I’m sorry I left before making sure you were all okay. I should’ve—”

“No, Deke, you have nothing to apologize for. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go out and see the world when you had a chance to do so, especially since it was a world you’d seen so little of. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you then, and that we haven’t been able to be there for you in general. We know that you’re a smart guy, truly, but you just needed some better guidance and we should’ve been there for you.”

“It’s okay — you were busy looking for your husband. I’m sure deep space didn’t have great cell service.” She laughed a little bit at his bad joke, as he hoped she would, lightening the mood a little bit.

“Despite the fact that we’re currently time traveling, we can’t change our own past. So all we can offer now is a place with us, now and forever. I can’t know what’s going to happen on or after this mission, but we just want you to know that you’ll always have a home with us. You can work with us or just hang out with us, but you’ll always be our family.” And there was his throat tightening again. After a conversation about the importance of emotional vulnerability, maybe Deke shouldn’t be passionately shoving that feeling back, but they did have a job to do, after all.

So instead, he stepped forward to hug her again, holding on until Mack’s voice crackled through the speakers a few moments later, calling them all together to talk strategy. That was the life of a SHIELD agent, always struggling to find the time to have important conversations while in the middle of saving the world. He didn’t mind it, most of the time, and he actually didn’t now either. Because this was a beginning for him, not an ending. A “to be continued,” not a “happily ever after.” He didn’t mind having to wait for his fairytale ending to eventually play out, because somehow, he knew it would. He had a family who loved him, and so it would all be okay.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is pretty much just Deke's thoughts and extremely detailed pseudoscience with almost no dialogue and not a ton of action but I had a goot time coming up with this and I'm really proud of my pseudoscience so I'm posting it anyways. The next chapter should be up this weekend and that'll be some cute family fluff, so you could skip this chapter if quantum mechanics isn't your thing. If it is your thing, then I apologize for any inaccuracies, because am not and will never be a physicist, but I had a ton of fun doing research to figure out how this time machine could work.
> 
> Also, this is a couple minutes after midnight but let's pretend I'm in a different time zone and got this done on time?

Deke was the Director of SHIELD now and his family was in a different timeline, but it was okay. Really, it was. Here, he got to be a rockstar, people respected him, and he had plenty of close friends, too. It was all he’d ever wanted, so he should be able to ignore the little empty room in his heart where certain people should be residing. It should be a small price to pay, never seeing them again, when it meant they were safe and the world was saved and he got to protect his adoring fans and the rest of the world from here. But no matter how much he truly did enjoy leading and how much joy he got from signing autographs and seeing his people become better fighters through training sessions he helped lead, no matter how many times he told himself it should be enough, it wasn’t. He loved and missed his family, and there was no getting around that.

So maybe that was why he ordered a few of the agents in the bar to help him bring the pieces of his Bobo’s time machine and his weird helmet to their new base. They had remained at the bar at first, since all SHIELD bases had been destroyed, but it wasn’t long before they began organizing reconstruction with the help of the American government. The fact that he managed to make an invasion by time-traveling planet-stealing aliens into something that the government believed, well, it was definitely a skill in his wheelhouse, but it helped cement his position as leader. Leaders were supposed to be smooth-talkers, after all, and Deke had been told talking was his main talent (and what made him most annoying, but that part was less relevant). The one base they didn’t rebuild, though, was the Lighthouse. He wanted a new start, and a new start with plenty of windows and natural light.

For the first few months, he was too busy to think about the collection of parts sitting in a box in his office. Restarting a secret organization was certainly no small task, even with this being his second rodeo. This time, though, he wasn’t alone. He had a larger group of agents to start with, and the rumors of an alien invasion certainly helped with recruitment. Deke wasn’t entirely sure what SHIELD did when the world wasn’t on the brink of an apocalypse, since that had been his sole experience with it, but he was sure he could figure it out. No one outside of the original Deke Squad knew his true past, but he’d somehow proven himself to be a good fit for the job. They all trusted him to figure things out, and so he would. The world would probably try to end again soon, but hopefully not until after they’d rebuilt sufficiently.

Outside of the time machine, the only things he had to remember his second timeline with were the clothes he’d been wearing when he was last with his friends, and the tool with an engraved “17” that he’d pocketed for luck. He’d carried around the version of it from his original timeline for most of his life, motivated by the need to scrounge for anything useful, but nostalgia prevented him from ever trading it for food. After meeting his grandfather and finding him a bit disappointing, Deke hadn’t thrown away the tool, but he’d kept it in a drawer instead of in his pocket every day. However, his young grandfather’s version of the tool had joined the other in said drawer. Since Deke had stolen it, it appeared Fitz had bought or built another version for their time-travel-inventing adventure, but left it on his workstation for Deke to find. He’d clearly noticed Deke’s odd affinity for the tool, so now he had 3 of them. The same instinct that had him grab the two before the battle with Izel had grabbed all of them before his final battle against the Chronicoms. It was definitely a slightly inconvenient lucky charm, given the size and weight, but Deke was grateful for the reminder of the other two timelines he’d called home. Not that he could ever really forget living in three separate timelines, but still. They all sat in a line on a shelf in his office representing his childhood, his family, and his future. Daisy would probably tell him that was cheesy, but he didn’t really want to think about her for too long.

By the time he had a free moment to work on it, Deke had almost forgotten about the time machine. He was idly spinning around on his desk chair, wondering how he was going to spend his day, when he spotted the box. He pressed his feet firmly to the floor to stop the motion of his chair, leaning forward a bit awkwardly to regain his balance. Slowly, he took the pieces out one by one and reassembled the device from memory. He’d made a career out of stealing tech, so how hard could this possibly be?

As he put it together, Deke was mostly just focused on remembering their arrangement, and less on figuring out how to reverse engineer the completed device’s function. That is, until he got to the final piece: his Nana’s ring. He knew it was an important part of the device, and yet he still gave into the urge to slip it onto the middle finger of his left hand. Now, he had a piece of both of his grandparents to carry with him, and that made him want to cry a little bit. He had grown and changed, yes. He was no longer the naïve kid they’d picked up from a future they ensured would never occur. But in this moment, he felt more like a little kid than he had in awhile, just wanting a hug from his grandparents. He wondered if they missed him as much as he missed them. Thinking back to the conversation he’d had with Jemma practically a lifetime ago, though, maybe they actually did. After spending so much of his life hiding his emotions and being taught to be careful of who to trust, it went against his instincts to just believe that someone cared about him, but they were his family. At the very least, he desperately wanted them to truly care about him.

In the coming weeks, whenever he had a free moment, Deke would take some time to try and figure out how the machine worked. He had a basic idea of it from the information Fitz had given him when they were reconfiguring it to send everyone home, particularly pertaining to how it was powered. Every engineer knew that the best way to reverse engineer something was to follow the energy transfers, anyways, so that was helpful. It also helped that he’d worked on the time drive with Jemma before, and although this machine was different, it was clearly operating on similar principles. The time drive was a version of the Kree jump drive that could move in 4 dimensions instead of just 3, with their conception of time, of course, being the 4th. Yeah, Deke knew who Hermann Minkouski was, and he’d read _Flatland_ , despite the sexism. He knew how space-time worked. Sort of.

Deke had read a couple of articles online when he was originally copying the jump drive, so he had a general grasp of quantum physics along with general relativity too. His grandparents weren’t the only geniuses in the family, after all. He knew that you had to use the dimension beyond the one you’re in to travel through your current one, and that that was the basic concept behind all of these machines. The space monolith, the jump drive, and the space stone (yeah, he read the news, he knew what infinity stones were too) all use the 4th dimension to move the user through the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, even though they used different mechanisms and he only fully understood one, the concept was there.

The theory was based on the idea that people are only able to do more than just move as a flat line because of the 3rd dimension. Without that line becoming a box, there was no north or south or east or west for us to travel in, even though walking in one of those directions is technically only 2 dimensional movement. Flying a plane could let you move in 3 dimensions without using the 4th, but that was different than the way these machines worked — traveling through the next dimension up allows for what appears to be teleportation, instead of motion that you can watch, because it takes place in a dimension you can’t see.

Deke hadn’t figured out time travel on his own, but he was able to look at how his grandparents did it and follow their logic. Well, impulsively reading _A Wrinkle in Time_ to see how scientifically accurate it was also helped. He wasn’t quite sure why the characters needed to travel through the fifth dimension when they didn’t seem to be time traveling, but that's besides the point. Mrs. Whatsit’s explanation of how Mrs. Who could fold her skirt, therefore using the 3rd dimension, to help the bug instantly get along the 2 dimensional plane of the edge of her skirt was a good way to conceptualize teleportation. Quantum entanglement explained why this form of teleportation actually worked, but luckily for Deke, the Kree and his grandparents had already done the math on that, so he only needed a general understanding to work with any of the machines.

Anyways, the point was that the last time machine he’d worked on had worked by transporting people through the 5th dimension, since it had to move the user through the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th dimensions. Initially, he’d wondered if this time machine was using the 6th dimension and treating multiple timelines as the 5th, but that didn’t exactly seem to be the case. For starters, he didn’t know what the fifth dimension was. Well, he knew it was created to find a direct connection between gravity and electromagnetism, but that didn’t exactly help him. It wasn’t as simple as saying it was just “time” and no one fully understood what it was, but it didn’t seem related to space-time, so Deke figured his grandparents probably just took another route for inventing inter-timeline time travel than discovering a whole new dimension. Every good scientist knew Occam’s Razor, and figuring out how a new dimension worked definitely couldn’t be the simplest solution here.

Unfortunately, it seemed like he was going to need to understand a little more about quantum entanglement. His next theory was that this time machine used the 5th dimension to travel through the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, but used quantum entanglement to move between timelines. The theory was that the timelines were like parallel planes and since time moved in a straight line on each timeline, typical time travel only had coordinates on that line, but having a link to another timeline could let someone hop between the parallel planes and hop to precisely where they wanted to go. Perhaps moving in that other direction was akin to moving in another dimension, or perhaps the quantum link just allowed freer rein of the 4th dimension, but that didn’t exactly matter. As long as Deke could reproduce this link, he could travel back to his grandparents’ timeline. His curiosity about things was more functional than theirs was: he only cared about how things worked until he got them to, while they liked to understand things just for understanding’s sake. They got into science because they wanted to know how the world worked, while he got into it because he needed to use whatever tools he could to survive the world he was in.

It took Deke a bit longer than he’d care to admit to figure out what his grandparents had used as a link: his Nana’s ring. It was fully from the other timeline: she had always worn it there, took it off for missions during this one, and only left it on when she was on base, which was a plane built by her and Fitz in the other timeline. The only time it had left the plane was to get from there to the bar, Jemma somehow remembering enough or just following her instinct to put it on when she was on the Zephyr. That meant, until Deke had put it on his hand and carried it around for months, pretty much the only interaction it’d had was with particles in the other universe, so it was tied to there. So apparently, at least on the quantum level, there was a difference between the particles of different timelines, which was absolutely _fascinating_ , but also incredibly complicated, so he was quite thankful that his grandparents had figured out how to detect that difference and use it to connect timelines. Deke was quite skilled at letting other people do the hard work on something — after all, why repeat what someone else had already done?

Which left him kicking himself for letting his nostalgia get in the way of actually getting to see his grandparents again. He refused to believe there wasn’t another way, though. So here he was, spinning away on his desk chair on another free afternoon. That is, until his roaming eyes landed on his nostalgia shelf. In addition to the tools, it now boasted a couple other small knick-knacks, like a dried daisy and a toy car, that he would never admit to having. The people who came into his office now didn’t know what he meant, but even if this crazy plan worked out, Deke would absolutely never tell his friends about his little collection. Sure, he was working on being more emotionally open, but everyone knew you had to keep some things to yourself and not let it be too clear that you cared about your friends and family.

Tickets for an indulgent trip down memory lane aside, though, his grandfather's tool could be the ticket Deke needed for a much more important trip. Aside from accompanying him to the final battle, all three had pretty much just sat on this shelf or on his dresser on the Zephyr in this timeline. They had spent a decent amount of time in it, but Deke had to hope that the fact that they hadn’t really interacted with this timeline all that much meant that they were still entangled with their original timeline more strongly. He chose the newest addition to his collection, since the first was also tied to the timeline where he was born and he definitely didn’t want to risk going back there, and because there was a slightly irrational voice that told him Fitz had left him this tool for this purpose. Maybe Deke was just overthinking it and his Bobo had actually just left him out the tool as a sign that he cared about him, like Jemma said, or maybe he knew this was a possible outcome because of his work with the time stream and had done something to this tool, just in case, to make sure it stayed tied to the correct timeline. Deke didn’t particularly want to work through the science of it and figure out for sure, but he went with that tool on that slightly insane hope anyways, because otherwise it would’ve just been a coin flip between the remaining two.

All it took was some slight reconfiguration to make it so the tool could be inserted instead of a ring, and the machine was ready to go. Well, sort of. There was a bit of a problem: based on how Fitz used the machine, its function was to bring something or someone specific from a certain timeline, and then to transport something or someone back there. Deke figured that it would only take the rewiring of some circuits in order to reverse the order so it would send him to the other timeline, since even if the theory was still a bit fuzzy to him the reverse engineering process had made how each part functioned clear to him, but he didn’t know how to make sure he could come home afterwards. And as desperately as he wanted to see his friends and family, he was the Director of SHIELD now. He couldn’t afford to be reckless with his own life like he used to be able to. And yet, he didn’t want to send a lab rat through, or even a willing subordinate. He didn’t even really want anyone to know what he was doing. There might be someone he would trust, though.

“Director?”

“Agent Koenig.” Deke tried to summon up all the authority and gravitas that he could find within himself. Sure, it wasn’t much, but at least it was more than he’d had a year ago. “I have a top secret mission for you. It’s a simple task, but I need to know that I can trust you to keep this between us, and not ask any questions.” At any other organization, that would be a deeply concerning sentence. But this was SHIELD, so the young agent was practically bouncing in excitement. He wasn’t all that experienced yet, but Deke knew their family, and knew any of them would be up for the challenge.

“Yes sir, I can do it!” All the Koenigs were eager and energetic, but this one seemed to be more so than most.

“At precisely 11:58 tomorrow, I will call you into my office for another meeting. At 12:00 on the dot, I will activate this machine here—” Deke pulled off the black sheet that had been hiding what he was working on, which garnered a satisfyingly surprised gasp from the man across the desk from him. “—and I will disappear. If all goes well, I will appear again at exactly 12:01 pm. If I’m not back by 12:05, use my phone to call Roxie, Olga, and the Changs into my office. Use the code word ‘peanut butter’ and they’ll know what it means. They know what to do to explain away my death, no questions asked, my second in command will take over, and SHIELD will go on.” The old Deke Squad would know what it meant when Koenig told them, the code a reference to an old conversation about the difference between timelines, and Deke had absolutely no doubt that Olga would figure out a way to hide his death, but he didn’t want to tell them what he was doing ahead of time. It was a little reckless and maybe a lot irrational, but he didn’t want to have to say his plan out loud and hear how crazy it was. They wouldn’t let him get away with being evasive either. Koenig was now looking at him with a bit of mild panic, though, so Deke forced himself to snap out of his thoughts and rushed to assure him with, “But I’m almost certain that won’t be necessary, so no pressure!” _Nailed it_.

At 11:58 the next day, he called Koenig in, who was doing an admirable job of hiding his nerves. At 11:59, he hung up his long, black leather coat up on the back of his chair and pocketed his eyepatch. Koenig looked like he might be more shocked at the fact that both of Deke’s eyes were fine than at the fact that he was about to disappear from sight. Hopefully, he’d be able to keep that secret too. For the first time in a while, though, he wasn’t going to be playing the role of Director. He would just be Deke Shaw, grandson to Leo and Jemma Fitz-Simmons. With a final nod to the agent across the desk, Deke stood up and put on the helmet that had sat in the box with the parts for months. It fit perfectly, so apparently he’d inherited his grandfather’s head shape, which was convenient. And then he was ready to travel through the quantum realm to another timeline, relying solely on a simple metal tool to take him to where and when he wanted to be, instead of just leaving him to float endlessly in limbo, or thrust him into a worse timeline. These were not very helpful thoughts.

His last thought was a very in-character “here goes nothing!” before he clamped down the tool and colors exploded behind his eyelids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're confused about my pseudoscience or have some ideas of your own feel free to leave a comment or hmu on tumblr (same name as here) because I LOVE talking about time travel.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The description of time travel is brought to you by my annoyance at my own skin for being similarly dried out, and although it's my fault for being out of the pool so often on a daily basis without washing the chlorine off, it's still cathartic to complain through fanfiction.

There are some things that words have yet to be invented to describe. Considering that time travel was invented by his grandparents last year and also about half a century in the future, though, Deke figured he could give the English language a break. Maybe the Germans with all their weird compound words had something that could work, but he didn’t know any German, so he was stuck with just the words “everything” and “nothing.”

It was like he was both seeing the full spectrum of colors, and staring straight into the void. Like his skin was too small for his body, and yet he was infinitesimally small. The silence was so overwhelming, it felt like the loudest thing he’d ever heard. The closest thing to a similar experience that he could think of was that time he went skiing, joining an expedition he’d found online with other random people. He’d been surrounded by people and the whistling of the wind, and yet gazing down the mountain at the untouched snow off to the sides of the trails, he felt like he was painfully alone, and yet also strangely peaceful. The next day, when he woke up, his skin felt like it was about to crack off his body. Unused to these kinds of temperatures, his skin had dried out almost instantly, leaving him to spend the day either slathered head to toe in the slimy substance he’d bought at the gift shop, or try to ignore how every movement pulled at his skin made him want to simultaneously scratch it off and press down hard to soothe it.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Once again, he stood on a sidewalk in River’s End, blinking at the suddenly bright sunlight, slack-jawed in shock. That was nothing like traveling through the time monolith, though, which felt more akin to a mild drowning, even if he ended up in the same place. Deke didn’t exactly _want_ to spend more time in the Lighthouse, but when he was setting the dials to choose the time (a little over a year ahead of when he left, so things had time to settle down) and place that he was going to be sent, he realized he didn’t actually know where the other SHIELD bases were, so this was his best bet. He didn’t even know if his grandparents were still with SHIELD, but at the very least, he would get to see Mack. Deke hadn’t even entertained the possibility that they’d lost, or that anyone had died. He knew the plan and knew the risks they would be taking, but he also knew his team, and dying wasn’t allowed. Seeing as River’s End looked like the same cliché small town as it always had, though, and not a Chronicom-filled husk, it seemed his assumptions were correct.

Usually, when entering the Lighthouse, Deke was on a Quinjet, or the Zephyr. But here he was, stuck walking up to the door and presenting himself to the camera like some common agent. He was fairly certain whoever was working the check-in desk from downstairs today wouldn’t have a heart attack at seeing someone seemingly come back from the dead, though. This was SHIELD, after all.

“State your name and purpose.”

“Deke Shaw. I need to speak to the Director.” There were some rustling noises in the background, and then another, more excited voice came over the speakers.

“THE Deke Shaw?!” Deke, Director of SHIELD and lead singer of The Deke Squad, knew a fan when he heard one. And he appreciated it, but he didn’t have time for autographs right now. He’d waited a full year, and yet now that he was here, he couldn’t summon the patience to wait a moment longer before getting to see his friends.

“Um, yes, I really need to talk to Mack, though, so…?” The door to the elevator was opening before he even finished speaking, accompanied by a slightly breathless apology squeaked out from the speakers above for the delay. When he reached the main floor, he didn’t waste a second on dealing with all the people watching him in awe and whispering about his miraculous reappearance. He only had eyes for one door. When it swung open, Deke found himself unceremoniously pinned against it. Which was...actually not all that surprising, given his apparent resurrection. Historically, those hadn't always gone well for the team.

“How do I know you’re real?” Mack growled out. Deke just wanted to hug him, but he couldn’t with how the much stronger man was holding his arms, so that was disappointing.

“What do you think I am?” Deke needed to know what he needed to argue against, and there were too many ways that people had come back from the dead recently to narrow it down on his own. “I’m a time traveler!”

“There’s no way you could really be here.” Mack doesn’t seem to be listening to what Deke was saying, too busy trying to process his presence alone. His voice had a note of hysteria in it, which Deke would _definitely_ be teasing him about later. “Y-you’re supposed to be in a different timeline, and FitzSimmons said there was nothing they could do to bring you back!”

“Nothing _they_ could do,” Deke said, with more cockiness than most people could muster with their arms held behind their back and their face smushed up against a door. He didn’t bother trying to explain the science of what he did, since he knew it would go over Mack’s head, so he just went with, “I’m the smartest FitzSimmons, obviously.”

“No Chronicom could ever muster that level of irrational confidence, even with May’s empathy boost,” Mack mused. “And FitzSimmons wouldn’t have made a surprise LMD. Plus, I don’t know how they or anyone else would’ve gotten a brain scan of you, so...” Apparently done with his bout of verbal thinking, Mack released Deke, only to engulf him in a bone-crushing hug. 

Well. That was unexpected. Nice, though. Deke liked hugs.

Mack was a very busy man, though, so fairly soon after, Deke was boarding a Quinjet with coordinates set for Scotland with a promise to come back later so they could properly catch up, and a silent agreement to not discuss his earlier display of emotion. Not because either wanted to be stereotypically emotionless men, but because Deke knew Mack wouldn’t want it getting out that he actually did care a lot about The D after all. Deke figured he’d break the news that he had a timeline to return to because he was also a Director of SHIELD and ask for some advice on the job then. The man had had enough of a shock for one day.

Before he knew it, the Quinjet was touching down in a field, and Deke was mentally thanking Fitz for the invention of autopilot, because although he’d been working on his flying skills, landings were still a bit of a challenge. Plus, it had been a while since he’d flown an actual Quinjet. He’d brought some futuristic technology to his SHIELD, but he had to be careful to dole it out over longer periods of time, so it looked like he was actually coming up with the ideas. Also, he didn’t have a photographic memory, so he’d spent the flight examining the controls to improve his version of the small plane. He called his a Shawjet.

He wasn’t sure where he’d imagined his grandparents living, but a small cottage on the Scottish countryside with a backyard big enough to land a Quinjet in definitely wasn’t it. He’d barely believed it when Mack had told him they’d both retired from SHIELD. In his head, Deke had sort of imagined them staying there forever, constantly inventing new things to keep saving the world. It was difficult for him to imagine a world where they stopped doing their genius double act thing and instead just wanted a quiet life with enough yarn to knit sweaters for all their friends. It made slightly more sense when Mack admitted that they’d both been sort of still consulting for SHIELD on the down low, since they’d always seemed to have loved their jobs, but still. They didn’t seem like the type to slow down or take a break, ever. And then he was hopping out of the Quinjet and the backdoor of said quaint cottage was opening, and Deke didn’t have time to rationalize this all because all that mattered was he was about to see his grandparents again.

“...Deke?!” He’d asked Mack not to tell them he was coming so he could have his big dramatic entrance, but instead of spreading his arms and announcing that yes, it was him, back and better than ever, he found himself running towards her and throwing himself into his grandmother’s arms like a child at the end of the first day of school before he even consciously decided to do so. She hugged him back just as tightly, though, so it was okay. “How are you here?”

“Time travel! I figured out how to use your time machine, and I reversed the order so it would send me somewhere and then take me back instead of the other way around.” Even now, even as the Director of SHIELD, he still just wanted his Nana’s approval, and she rewarded him with a proud smile. She opened her mouth to respond, but was interrupted by Fitz poking his head out of the door behind her, presumably to ask what Mack needed help with this time. When he saw it was his grandson standing there, and not some random SHIELD agent, his jaw dropped and he froze.

“I’ll go make us all some tea so we can catch up properly,” said Jemma, patting her husband on the shoulder as she brushed past him, clearly giving them a moment alone to talk. Deke cleared his throat, suddenly nervous.

“Hi, Bobo,” he said, because that seemed like the best way to start. Fitz seemed equally unsure of how to say what needed to be said, but he apparently had more courage than Deke did. He squeezed his eyes shut, clearly bracing himself against what he was about to say, and then:

“I love you.” It was quiet, more of a mutter than the confident way girls usually screamed those three words at him.

“...why?” Deke knew he wasn’t making this any easier on him, but it was the only response that came to mind. Fitz shrugged.

“You’re our grandson.” The matter-of-fact way he said it, as if that was explanation enough, made Deke’s throat feel a little tight, but he was determined not to cry. “It’s been a year since I’ve seen you, and five years since I’ve really had a chance to talk to you. And that conversation was a fight, but I think Jemma already talked to you about that and I just—” He shrugged again. “I don’t know how long it’s been for you, but I’m just happy you’re here. It doesn't feel like everything else matters all that much anymore,” he admitted.

“It's been a year,” Deke said with a small smile, and it was okay. It was really, truly okay. He loved his family, and they loved him, and he was just so happy to be here right now too. “It was a very eventful year, too. I’m the Director of SHIELD in my timeline, actually.”

“You’re WHAT?!”

Regaling his grandparents with stories of his adventures soon turned into debating the mechanics of time travel, and Deke’s modifications to their time machine. It was deeply refreshing for him to get to talk to people who were mentally his equals, because although it wasn’t the fault of his friends that he was a time traveler from the future, he had spent many a night wishing he could call up his grandparents for advice on solving a mechanical problem. And then that turned into going into his grandparents’ lab to help them reconstruct the time machine, because they didn’t want him to end up floating around in the nothingness between timelines and why reinvent the wheel, after all? Deke was almost more surprised at his _lack_ of surprise at the fact that his grandparents were clearly planning on subsequent visits from him. Fitz was talking about building a shed to house the time machine in to keep it out of the way when Deke heard the front door open, Daisy’s voice calling out to his grandparents.

It occurred to him then that he hadn’t asked too much about their lives and how they were all doing. They had gotten distracted, but now, they would definitely get onto that topic, with Daisy there to tell her stories as well. Deke had also missed her, and had been planning on visiting her, but his grandparents had been the priority, of course. He didn’t even notice the sound of a second set of footsteps or a second and much higher voice until a little girl was barreling into the room, Jemma halfway through a gentle admonishment to both her and Daisy about the rules of who was allowed inside the lab before she froze and remembered who was in the room with her.

“Honey, this is Uncle Deke. Remember, from—” The child cut her off, bouncing up and down excitedly.

“Yeah!" She turned to face Deke, speaking to him in particular now. "My mum and dad have told me so many stories about you. They said you were in a different time, though, so I’d never be able to meet you, but now you’re here! How are you here?” She asked, brow furrowing in an expression almost eerily similar to his grandmother. _Her_ mother. Woah. Deke must’ve been gaping in shock, so Daisy took pity on him.

“Alya, how about we give Uncle Deke and your parents a moment to clean up whatever they’re working on? We can go make a snack, and then they’ll join us, so Deke can regale us all with his adventures in time travel.” The way she smiled at him as she said that last part and her instant acceptance of his presence almost filled him with enough warmth to distract him from the fact that the girl he used to have a crush on was babysitting _his mother_.

“Deke...”

“We’re really sorry; we wanted to tell you—”

“—but Daisy just got back from a space mission and—"

“—she was already planning to take Alya out for the afternoon so—”

“—it just seemed easier to focus on you first but then—”

“But then we got distracted by working on the time machine,” Deke finished for his grandparents. He understood, he really did. It’s not that he was _upset_ per say, it was just a lot to process. He knew this was an entirely different timeline, so she wasn’t _really_ his mom, but it hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten her face, and he’d seen pictures of her as a kid. Even if she wasn’t his mom, she sure as hell looked like her, and shared her name too. “She told me she was named after her mom’s favorite star, because even when she was trapped in the Lighthouse with the world falling apart around her and a view of space better than Earth ever had, she still dreamed of the stars, of being somewhere else and somewhere better out in the endless universe.”

“We named her after Jemma’s favorite star because that’s where we went to take the time to raise her while we were originally building the time machine,” Fitz admitted. “She’s not _really_ your mother, but—”

“Yeah,” Deke said. “I know. It’s okay.”

Sitting on a well-worn couch with Daisy, Alya in between them and her parents occupying the armchairs, Deke thought he might actually be even more okay than he was before, because his family had just gotten bigger. Technically, he’d already met Alya, but this was a version of her he hadn’t actually met, and now she was back in his life again, over 20 years after her death. He hadn’t changed his mind about going back to his own timeline, but maybe he would have to visit a bit more often than the yearly pilgrimage he had agreed upon with his grandparents earlier. He had a spy organization to run, but he also had a niece to spoil. Even though she didn’t know and might not ever know that she was sort of his mom, she was still his family, and he wanted to be a part of her life.

A year ago, maybe he wouldn’t be feeling this content. Maybe he would feel insecure about his position in the family, especially considering that he wouldn’t physically be here that often. Maybe he would feel left out, since they were all leading such full and interesting lives without him. But he also had a full life, and as full as it was, there would always be room for his family, so they knew they had room for him too. His grandparents had told their daughter about him too, so he would’ve still been part of her life even if he never visited her, in a way. But most importantly, they said they loved him. And somehow, Deke believed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify, for anyone interested in the time travel, they'll agree on the time the year before, and then FitzSimmons will summon Deke to their timeline using their time machine, since that's the more reliable way to timeline hop (according to the rules I made up in my head because I can), using the eye patch Deke put in his pocket as the anchor to his timeline. Also, I know Daisy wasn't on the verge of coming home, but pretend something went wrong and they had to come home because I wanted her to be here for this.


End file.
